Landscape design practitioners and theorists understandably
focus on the ecological aspects of sustainability; this seems reasonable given
that the site and medium of our work is landscape—actual topography, soil,
water, plants, and space. It seems imperative given the growing consensus about
the impact of human action on the global environment. Beauty is rarely
discussed in the discourse of landscape design sustainability, and if it is, it
is dismissed as a superficial concern. What is the value of the visual and
formal when human, regional, and global health are at stake? Doesn’t the discussion
of the beautiful trivialize landscape architecture as ornamentation, as the
superficial practice of gardening?

I find American landscape architecture’s limited discussion
of sustainability curious, especially given the profession’s history. In the
19th century, one of its leading practitioners, Frederick Law Olmsted—a former
farmer, journalist, and director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during our
Civil War—was moved to make urban public parks and landscapes because of their
perceived agency as spaces of urban social and environmental reform. For
Olmsted, parks performed in two ways: First, they were environmental cleaning
machines, open spaces of healthy sunlight, well-drained soils, and shady groves
of trees reducing temperatures, absorbing carbon dioxide, and releasing oxygen.
Landscape architectural works such as urban parks, promenades and boulevards,
public gardens, parkways, and suburban residential enclaves were cultural
products that responded to, and then altered, the processes of modernization
and urbanization.

In Olmsted’s estimation this urban environmental function
was equaled, if not exceeded, by the second function—or in contemporary
theoretical terms, performance—of the designed landscape’s appearance. He cared
about what those landscapes looked like as well as how they worked. Based on
his readings of psychologists, art critics, and philosophers, Olmsted believed
that the experience of that appearance—the combination of its physical
characteristics and sensory qualities—altered one’s mental and psychological
state. In other words, a particular form of appearance, the character beauty,
performed. Examples of this are found in the recuperative, transformative power
of aesthetic experiences in nature. Olmsted developed his theories on the
psychological effects of landscapes as early as the 1850s, before he had
started to design, according to Charles Beveridge, Honorary ASLA, the historian
most closely associated with Olmsted’s archives. During his career as a
landscape architect, these theories were embedded in the firm’s annual or
official reports for park boards or clients of projects such as Prospect Park,
Brooklyn, the parks and parkways of Boston, and Mount Royal Park, Montreal. And
when asked to lecture on parks, Olmsted concisely summarized his ideas, as in
his conclusion to his 1868 address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association:
“A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain effects upon the mind of
men.”